Village: Wait'll next year!

Cooperstown outlook hurts with no living baseball stars for 2013 induction

Updated 7:54 am, Sunday, January 13, 2013

National Baseball Hall of Fame visitor services supervisor Nancy Oldick assures callers that there will be a Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony this year in Cooperstown Thursday Jan. 10, 2013. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union)

COOPERSTOWN — The folks in the spiritual home of baseball believe this year, a year that once held so much promise, will be the worst.

At least that's the hope.

Village leaders and business owners knew this day of reckoning, the legendary Class of 2013 that wasn't, was coming, that what should have been a bonanza for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the surrounding community will not be realized.

But after a half-decade slide in attendance some are optimistic that better times are ahead. The overall economy is improving. Gas prices, still fickle, are down slightly. And enshrinable big-name stars without taint are on the horizon.

Those upcoming years will surely draw crowds to Cooperstown in July — but perhaps not until 2014. On Wednesday it was announced that sports writers voted no living baseball stars into the Hall of Fame this year, although lesser-known, deceased baseball personalities will be inducted and still others will be honored with a ceremony. The 2013 Induction Class, which could have been one the hall's most star-studded in history, was waylaid by the Steroids Era.

Maybe the glory days of 350,000-plus trekking to the hallowed site are a thing of the past — only about 263,000 made the journey in 2012 — but maybe this is the bottoming out.

Talk of the Hall of Fame usually involves bitterness — not directly at the institution's operation, but its voting process, or the stars kept out.

Jeff Katz is a Seamhead, a nickname given to writers for the baseball website Seamheads.com. "The idea that the Hall of Fame is not a place for Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens is absurd to me," he said. (Both were among the list of players shunned in Wednesday's vote.)

Katz is also the mayor of Cooperstown.

"It makes for a difficult summer," Katz said of the absence of latter-day stars, explaining that they would have drawn a contingent of their fans to the induction ceremony if they'd made the cut.

Without them, locals realize the summer season could be bleak.

"The last three years my business has gone down and down and down," said Andrew Vilacky, owner of Safe at Home Ballpark Collectibles since 1996. "This could be my worst year in business. Without an induction class, I will go down more."

In the business office of a virtually empty Baseball Hall of Fame early Thursday afternoon, Nancy Oldick of visitor services took yet another call from a concerned fan.

"Yes, there will still be an induction ... " she said.

In the previous 24 or so hours there have been roughly a couple dozen such calls. But the class will be three figures from the pre-integration era who died in the 1930s, two media people, and tributes to Lou Gehrig, Rogers Hornsby and the Class of 1945 that never got a ceremony.

There will be no Bonds, the all-time home run king, or Clemens, one of the best pitchers of all time.

No Mike Piazza, a hero in New York, or Sammy Sosa, the only player to hit 60 home runs in three different seasons.

"Obviously, no one in Cooperstown was rooting for a shutout," Hall of Fame President Jeff Idelson said after revealing the vote Wednesday.

The vote — which prompted The New York Times to leave much of its sports front blank Thursday under the headline "And the Inductees Are ..." — is yet another blow to this tiny upstate village (pop. 1,852) that has reeled under a host of factors, not the least of which has been the beat-down of baseball nostalgia and cynicism sprouting from the Steroids Era, where many stars and others were linked to performance enhancing drug use.

For five straight years attendance at the Baseball Hall of Fame has slipped. The hall's attendance is down 13 percent since 2008, 25 percent since 2007 (the year a record number turned out for Induction Ceremonies for Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn), and 35 percent since 1993.

Ironically or not, the biggest two-year attendance run in the post-1994 strike era came in 1998-99. The 1999 induction class, led by Nolan Ryan and George Brett, was large and luminary. But as big a factor in the fans coming out was the Great Home Run Chase of 1998 between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Both were later linked to steroids. Neither got voted in Wednesday. (With a bare minimum number of votes, a player can stay on the ballot for 15 years.)

"I've been holding my own. That is the best I can say," said Rick Gibbons, whose Riverwood gift shop is the Main Street place you go to for last-minute toys or wedding/birthday gifts, in addition to some high-end stuff that is getting harder to move off the shelves these days. "Business has gone down percentage-wise every year."

Countywide, traveler spending and state and local sales tax receipts ticked up slightly between 2009 and 2011, according to the Cooperstown/Otsego County Tourism Office. But, as county tourism director Deb Taylor said, "2012 wasn't stellar, and I'm hearing from retailers they were down quite a bit."

But this might be the bottom, she and other locals hope.

"I feel like we leveled out," the Hall of Fame's Idelson said. "(The numbers) are not where we want them to be. We are in the trough at this point."

Part of the muted optimism has to do with the tentative belief the economy is improving. Then there are the incoming induction classes starting next year, with stars such as Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas (and Biggio and perhaps Piazza) who could bring a megacrowd to Clark Sports Center's lawn the last weekend in July.

And certainly there are other factors that drive tourism to the region, from the Glimmerglass Opera to Cooperstown Dream Parks, which hosts youth baseball games by the hundreds. But both of those entities are on the edges of the village. Traffic along Main Street rises and falls based largely on the baseball crowd.

With a high concentration of non-profits, the high-traffic village is stretched to generate revenue. Example: The Village Board recently implemented a new plan that will charge for parking.

"We do struggle with massive infrastructure for a small village that is a showpiece, and how to pay for that without going back to the taxpayer over and over," Katz said. "We are fortunate that we have a lot of drivers. The Hall is a main driver. But Bassett Hospital employs more people than who live in the village."

Business leaders talk of the need for more activities and a greater diversification. "We need to provide more product," Taylor said. Some hold hope the fans will return in force. (Before the end of the decade, stars such as Derek Jeter and Ichiro Suzuki could draw record crowds to Cooperstown.) For now, for this year, hold on.

"Regardless of the year, the election is the biggest event in the county," Katz said. "Even a poorly attended event, it's a big deal."

The executive director at the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce took a slew of calls from reporters this week. Patricia Szarpa's message: We'll survive, and it will get better.

"Yes, numbers have gone down over the years, but the numbers are huge for Hall of Fame visitors," she said. "They've gone through lean years and big gangbusters years. It can vary hugely year to year. That has gone on since the beginning. We bear the brunt of it.

"Cooperstown — all its merchants and its residents — are already geared up for its ups and downs."